Harley Benton California TrueTone

Great pedal

In the past few years after getting into pedals again and to have fun during lockdown i have bought, played, and sold over 100 pedals, most of them boutique. I have also bought some cheap chinese pedals but most of them have let me down. This series of pedals however, are not only good as cheap pedals they are just great pedals. Just figure out how to properly set them up. The California has way huge amounts of bass, if you want a classic tone just dial the bass almost all the way off. Also, make sure to have a good isolated power supply and if you get noise switch up the order of pedals and it should solve it.

excellent

This drive is what i was looking for.

I play a HB. SC CUSTOM II P90s

And for hard rock like gnr , def leppard ,poison and stuff like social distortion, ramones this drive is perfect. The knobs are doing the job correctly .Built quality , price excellent , a lot better than some more expensive pedals. Perfect sound .....

I enjoy it every day

Let's Boogie!

All the True Tone pedals are great sounding complete with 3 tone controls. If you're on an extreme budget you can't go wrong with these pedals. And if your not on a budget you'd be crazy not to buy all of them! ....PS little known fact : These pedals also have some sort of speaker simulator in them so you can plug them directly into your DAW and the result is very passable indeed.

Very Nice Pedal

What a Pedal, sounds good in every plug. easy to use and very good quality sound.

Haven't found a good sound (yet).

First impression is good. The pedal looks and feels solid, in its metal casing. It is rather versatile in the variety of distortion sounds one can create using the voice dial. It's supposed to create Mesa Boogie-type sounds, but I'm not familiar enough with those amps to comment. I bought this pedal based on sound examples on You Tube. Having said that, I've tried it going into a valve pre-amp and into the power-amp, and I haven't really found a sound that I like. Some overdriven sounds are pretty decent, though. Maybe it's the amp modelling that makes it sound somewhat muffled and compressed... I'll keep trying, though!

Excellent value and sound

These truetone pedals sound awesome

You can get a very familiar sound very easily and it works perfectly in an ampless setup since it works nicely directly into an interface or monitors.

The EQ is also very nice and has a very wide range. The highs can get a bit screamy if you go too fast.

I bought one ... and another ..... and one more will come ...

You might consider to get it and slap it everywhere... with your favorite amp (to have an alternative distortion ) or your less fav amp ( it will make you like it more... probably) ... or directly to the sound card and the daw... or you can also decorate the living-room with it cause it is a nice 6 knobs metal brick that, let's be honest, for the price "we" like a lot and it shines too under direct light. ( although I prefer to use it to play).

Either ways ... in case ends up on the pedalboard enjoy it! I do :D

OK tones available but far from stunning

OK tones are on tap here but nothing that really blows me away, or even likely to be used by me. Not so good as the American, AC Tone or British from the same series.

Great amp simulation pedal

This is the second pedal I got from the TrueTone series.

It's simple to use, it works and sounds fantastic.

I mostly use these after a distortion/overdrive pedal, so I can stack some gain, and sounds really punchy, and warm, and even sounds good plugged directly into PC audio interface.

I love these pedals, for their dynamic range, versatility using the 3 band EQ, and voice knob, and you really can't beat it with this price.

great sounding pedal

I got this pedal for use while busking and on the studio.

It has great tones and is very versatile, specially when you use the voice knob. You can go from crystal cleans to full on metal.

It's very solid and feels like it can take a beating. I thought it was going to be made of plastic but it's aluminium, which is a nice surprise. The knobs feel solid too but the footswitch looks like it's cheap and might need replacing one day.

The eq is very sensitive so you don't need to move it much to get the changes in the sound that you need. If you use the super high gain settings it can get really noisy.

Even though the pedal has a simulated speaker output, you may want to try using it along with a cab impulse response while recording directly to your interface. The sound of the pedal is bright enought that you can get away with it and it just sounds su much better.

I completey recommend this pedal and I would like to get the other models to have all the sounds available.